Imagine you are in charge of running a large manufacturing plant - let's say an electric car production facility. After you have placed a large order for solid state batteries, Werner, one of your trusted component suppliers walks your factory floor with you and stops in front of a raft of different CNC machines - some that cut or mould pieces; others assemble these and other parts together.

He points at them and says: "Recently we installed these super machines in our warehouses that can do pretty much anything and we have come up with a really exciting new business model. Would you be interested in hearing more about this?" Of course, any analogy goes only so far and comparing this setup to cloud computing is no different. But bear with me for a moment and ignore the logistics of raw materials and finished goods...

Instead, I’d like you to think about offerings in the digital world that might fit the above description. You might come up with virtualisation, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or even platform as a service (PaaS) but I am talking about serverless here - the next evolutionary step in cloud computing. Currently, this is taking the world by storm with new articles, talks and books published every day - you can even attend conferences dedicated to that very topic...